Evaluating metabolic and bariatric surgery fellows' attitudes toward their training

Abstract

Background: The American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgeons (ASMBS) Leadership Academy is conducted at the ASMBS Weekend to prepare surgeons for practice, while in their fellowship.

Objectives: The aim of this analysis is to gather the views of current fellows in training on issues regarding practice patterns and career development.

Setting: Survey at ASMBS Fellows Leadership Academy.

Methods: An online survey was conducted at the last 2 ASMBS Leadership Academy Meetings at the ASMBS Weekend. There were 14 questions. There were 61 respondents. Twenty-three respondents had incomplete surveys and were not included in the final analysis. There were 24 fellows surveyed at the Leadership Academy in November 2022, in San Antonio, TX and 37 in January 2022, in Las Vegas, NV.

Results: Fifty-eight percent of attendees were interviewing for employment after their fellowship with 3.64% already employed. Eighteen percent had employment secured upon completion of their fellowship. Of the academic fellows, 29.1% believe that private practice will no longer exist in 2030 and 10.9% of attendees believe that we will have Medicare for all by 2030. Fellows in academic programs ranked their fellowship as either "best decision of my life" or "great" (96.4%) and 3.6% ranked it as "useless (not good/not bad)." Ninety-three percent of attendees said they would do a bariatric fellowship again. Of those that said they would not, all were from a robotic fellowship program. Of those that would do a bariatric fellowship again, 80% stated they would do so at the same institution.

Conclusions: The fellows that attended the ASMBS Leadership Academy overall were very pleased with their fellowship experience, and most would choose to do a MIS/bariatric fellowship again.

Keywords: Bariatric fellows; MIS/Bariatric fellows; Practice patterns.